Chris Cotta is with Petersburg’s rod and gun club. He’s excited that the town’s shooting range will be getting a new boardwalk after Gov. Mike Dunleavy signed the state capital budget without vetoing the $30,000 project. But he said he’s not sure why it’s getting funded – it wasn’t a priority for the borough.
“I just don’t know what the mechanisms were,” he said. “But we’re happy nonetheless, that it survived the vetoes and that we can do some work with that money.”
The money will go to redesign a badly damaged boardwalk used to put up and take down targets at the gun range.
Each year the Alaska Legislature puts together a capital budget – money to fund construction projects around the state. This year four Petersburg projects made it into the proposed capital budget. And two made it past Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s veto pen – a lot for a smaller municipality. The other one, besides the shooting range boardwalk, is a roof replacement for the middle and high school. The roof was damaged during heavy snows a few years ago. The project was third on the borough’s priority list.
The state will pay for about two thirds of the more than $4 million project. The assembly is currently deciding whether to send a proposition to voters in October, letting them decide whether to pay the rest through property taxes over the next couple decades. The assembly voted unanimously to do so earlier this month. They will vote two more times.
The Borough’s priority list also included an overhaul of a heavily used boat launch at Banana Point on the south end of Petersburg’s Mitkof Island, estimated at around $2 million. A small portion of that project made it into the capital budget – $200,000 – but was vetoed by Dunleavy. Steve Geistbrecht is Petersburg’s borough manager.
“So the $200,000 – that’s a sizable amount of money that we could have used to replace the bathrooms or something like that,” he said.
But he said there’s a lot more that needs to be done.
“The road itself needs to be redone and the parking lots in decent shape, but it needs to be graded,” he said. “Then we wanted to add a boarding float that we could put out in summer and take down in the winter. And we had to fix the breakwater.”
And then there’s the South Harbor Utility Float – a project also vetoed by Dunleavy. Harbormaster Glorianne Wollen said the work float that made it into the capital budget wasn’t really a priority. And Wollen said the amount set aside – about $200,000 – was nowhere near enough to get the job done. She said she would’ve been happy to tell folks working on the capital budget that the money would be better spent replacing some aging finger floats in Petersburg’s South Harbor – a project that is in the Borough’s top ten priority list.
“So $200,000 would go much further towards individual finger float replacement,” she said. “If we’re looking at each one of those being, you know, $100,000, we could have taken that and bought two finger floats with it.”
Geisbrecht said a lot of what makes it into the capital budget is up to Republican Senator Bert Stedman of Sitka. He co-chairs the powerful Senate Finance Committee, which means he’s one of just a handful of people who essentially holds the state’s purse strings.
“Bert’s always been fond of shooting ranges, so I’m sure that’s why he picked that one,” he said. “The workfloat in the harbor and banana point, he’s aware of both of those. Banana point, he scores points with us and Wrangell, because Wrangell uses it a lot. So I’m sure that crossed his mind. And the fishermen with the workfloat.”
The borough’s top priority – a project to build a new hospital in Petersburg – didn’t make it into the budget. In May Stedman told KFSK that many other communities have more important capital projects, like a new fire hall and police station in Wrangell – and even that didn’t make it into this year’s capital budget. And he said he’s concerned that Petersburg’s hospital project is being funded and built bit by bit, using something called “phased construction.” He said that could leave it without funding to finish the project.
